


if you keep on looking up at night

by TrisB



Category: Mirrormask (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-20
Updated: 2006-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-28 11:22:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/307358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrisB/pseuds/TrisB
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Like figures on a cuckoo clock, they bowed deeply to each other, meeting low with a chaste peck.</p>
            </blockquote>





	if you keep on looking up at night

**Author's Note:**

  * For [whatimages](https://archiveofourown.org/users/whatimages/gifts).



Helena and Valentine's second kiss comes directly after their first, the staged climax of a lord-and-lady sketch they were putting on for an attentive audience made up of a shady-looking crew of papier mâchè clowns with painted balloons for noses, toy soldiers, and a unnaturally furry plush fish. "Plasticine and plaster citizens of Trailerdonia," he'd said, gesturing, "I present my wife, your new and yet already deeply beloved queen, the Lady Helena." Like figures on a cuckoo clock, they bowed deeply to each other, meeting low with a chaste peck.

Even as their lips meet, the fiction crumbles away, and they straighten to appraise the situation. Helena smiles and seems shy and Valentine feels safe for a moment before she's grinning quite widely and kissing him again, which he likes, and helps her with until books are falling off the shelves affixed to the wall they've backed into and they both begin to feel rather foolish.

"Dear me," he says, "you don't mess around with introductions, milady."

"It's not my fault the king of Trailerdonia's a hopeless lech."

"Possibly," he counters, "but you married him, you see, so it is, a bit — oh my God, Helena. I'm a lech."

She squeezes his hands in encouragement. "You're terrible."

"I am! Here I've been hired to uphold the dignified tradition of men in stockings with makeup on throwing balls at themselves and instead I'm just a lecherous carnival worker snogging a perfectly legal teenager in front of innocent toys."

"I don't think you could be any terribler," Helena agrees.

"I could, and I'll tell you how, which would be if terribler were a word." She gazes at him steadily, and he can't not look back. This is the end — it's always been — of every dream he's had since finding employment under the Campbell big top. It's stupid to fight it, stupid not to have tried, stupid to be worrying after she's fixed him with the dizzying constellation of her affections and is grown enough to know how to spell papier mâchè, which she'd demonstrated with aplomb earlier that day. He exhales. "If only you spoke better English, we could achieve a veritable nadir of terror."

"Apex, you mean."

"I'd rather a zenith, but surely it's a depth, not a height — ?"

Helena kisses him again to shut him up, and just as an experiment he decides to not bother about anything other than her lips. She nods pointedly at the clowns, the soldiers and the fuzzy green fish. "It's only lechery if it's got an audience."

"I'm certain that makes no sense," Valentine remarks, covering the figurines with a tea towel. He takes her by the hand. "There, are we safe now?"

"Never."

"Ah." He smiles and shoots a glance out the window; stars are there beyond the obfuscation of electric light, and it's lovely to know. "Milady Helena."

"Milord Valentine." She curtsies.

"I've always liked your eyes," he says, and that's when they try kiss number four.  



End file.
